It’s Time for Revolt Against Intolerable and Indefensible Tyranny

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We no longer have a government that is legitimately deriving its powers from the consent of the American people on any level. Illegal aliens and criminals are getting standing in court for benefits while we are suffering from the worst tyranny in our nation’s history. When will the American people rise up?

Our Founders fought the concept of “taxation without representation.” Shouldn’t we rise up against government worker compensation without representation until this coronavirus fascism is ended?

One thing is clear: After this economic Hiroshima has settled, all jobs will be gone except for government jobs. As sure as the sun will rise tomorrow, every government worker – regardless of how important and essential his job is at any time, much less at a time like this – will receive 100 percent of his salary. Yet all those small businesses and the lifetime of dreams, tears, toil, and sweat that went into them will be gone. Isn’t it time for government officials to share in the pain of the shutdown their bosses are imposing on the private sector? To that end, the citizenry must rise up and demand that their county councilmen, state legislators, and Congress convene and pass the following propositions:

All top government officials should not get paid until this is over.

State taxes should be suspended.

All nonessential government workers should have their salaries and hours cut back 30 percent for every week this goes on.

All county councilmen and state legislatures must permanently strip executives of emergency powers beyond 24 hours without consent from a legislative body.

No regulations on individuals or family activities that are not in violation of CDC distancing guidelines.

No federal bailouts for the states.

Putting the economic effects aside, the assault on our way of life is even worse. This virus, coming from China, has turned us into China. Just over the past few days, we have witnessed the Michigan governor ban all travel to a friend or relative’s home. The same governors who would sue the president for banning travel from countries with terrorists now violate the most inalienable right of freedom of movement.

We’ve seen a 12-year-old girl cited for playing basketball alone. We’ve witnessed the Louisville mayor ban drive-through church services for Easter and the Kentucky governor sending out police to check the licens plates of those parked in church parking lots.

We all watched with horror as a dad in Colorado was handcuffed for playing ball with his 6-year-old daughter and a man was dragged off a Philadelphia subway car for not wearing a mask. Just like in China. The only clause of the Bill of Rights still left intact is freedom of speech, if not freedom of assembly, although Facebook has already censored an article of mine and Medium has taken down very well-written articles by doctors questioning the strategy behind the shutdown.

The Stamp Act and Intolerable Acts were much more tolerable that what is going on today. And remember, they are just getting started. Dr. Fauci, who seems to be running the country, is talking about possibly getting back to some “degree of normality” … by November. Remember, as C.S. Lewis warned, “Those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”

Throughout all of this, we must ask: Where is President Trump? The other side has tyrannical state and local officials, but where is our voice at the federal level, and why is Fauci able to rule over us?

Trump supporters must demand the following from the president:

Immediately fire Dr. Anthony Fauci.

Promise never to give another penny to state governments prolonging this shutdown, as Maryland Governor Larry Hogan asks for another $500 billion to bail out his mendacity.

Threaten federal lawsuits against states violating civil rights.

Threaten to call in the National Guard to enforce the Constitution against those state officials needlessly implementing martial law, the same way President Eisenhower did in Arkansas when state schools resisted desegregation.

Amid all the tyranny, we ironically have a large degree of anarchy, as criminals are released and go undeterred. Police boast about going after everyday Americans for violating the lawless lockdown edicts of governors, but seem impotent in dealing with dangerous criminals. Also, illegal aliens, who don’t belong in this country to begin with, continue to be released by judges, while Americans are treated like illegal aliens outside their homes.

Our Declaration of Independence established our right to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and governance by consent. It also established the principle that that “whenever any Formof Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

This is our right to self-government. As it states in the Maryland Declaration of Rights: “Trustees of the Public, and, as such, accountable for their conduct: Wherefore, whenever the ends of Government are perverted, and public liberty manifestly endangered, and all other means of redress are ineffectual, the People may, and of right ought, to reform the old, or establish a new Government; the doctrine of non-resistance against arbitrary power and oppression is absurd, slavish and destructive of the good and happiness of mankind.”

If we choose to “to suffer while evils are sufferable,” we might not get another chance. It’s time to party like it’s 1776. (For more from the author of “It’s Time for Revolt Against Intolerable and Indefensible Tyranny” please click HERE)

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Comrade Fauci and Field Marshall Birx – the New High Priests of Scientism

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April 7, 2020 – San Francisco, CA – PipeLineNews.org – Nothing floats the boat of autocrats more reliably than statistics. This is so because it lends bureaucrats a pretext to speak with a kind of religious authority which would ordinarily be denied them.

We in the West live in an automated, technocratic culture where decisions of all kinds are made according to the vagaries of “big data.” Mathematical in nature, such things as regression analysis and other kinds advanced methods are used to arrive at models that for many, implicitly carry the seal of “certifiably true.”

This method or technique is very handy, for example in manufacturing where it allows corporations to control the overall process in as lean, efficient and profitable a manner as possible.

For example, the United States automobile industry in order to remain economically viable, must bring together at the point of manufacture literally tens of thousands of components and processes. This need be done in order to keep production lines running at a rate consistent with demand. Lacking even the smallest part needed to assemble the final whole, stops the process cold, a reality very much consistent with the ancient proverb, “for want of a nail…the battle was lost, all for the loss of a horse-shoe nail.”

Command of huge amounts of viable data allows manufacturers to keep inventories as low as possible, so that much needed capital isn’t tied up in components [often financed] that in themselves are non-profitable while sitting on shelves. In Detroit [a metaphor, the automobile industry being widely dispersed across the globe] inventories are often kept at a level which will last for only 4 hours! This means that during an 8-hour-shift, entire inventories will be turned twice, supplies arriving no faster than they are consumed – a process that accountants call “just-in-time.”

But producing goods is vastly different from using these same processes to lend an air of empirical truth or veracity to decisions which may well affect the life or death of individual citizens. This process can be seen as a sort of philosophical triage where the well-being of each citizen in contrasted against the amorphous concept – the public good.

The consequences of running out of engine mounts at Chevrolet’s Bowling Green Corvette assembly line shuts things down right now, lost profit and angry customers results. But once the inventory of mounts returns to the proper calculated level, production returns, profits flow and hot-rodders get to do burnouts.

However the consequences of making poor choices within the realm of social/people issues simply because they are supported by assumedly correct empirical data can be disastrous, as we are now witnessing in the health-care field. Nearly every day for the last month Americans have been treated to the Fauci/Birx amateur hour where two individuals – each a highly intelligent medical doctor – have been ceded control of the world’s largest and most important economy, the one that drives the welfare of billions.

This is a planned result; it is happening because the West’s cultural leaders have been deluded in welcoming empiricism into the very difficult process of reasoning we use to think about and make ethical and moral choices.

Much of the impetus behind this process can be traced to the philosophical trends of the last two hundred years ago, certainly from Kant and Hegel onward through Marx and Nietzsche whereby the ethical concepts of truth, good and evil have been destroyed, dismissed as being non-cognitive principles, incapable of producing knowledge.

God is dead – we killed Him.

Yes or no, on or off, the binary 1 or 0, that now largely reckons our world. In a vast number of areas we have become slaves to scientism, the elevation of the scientific method to the level of a religion.

As a consequence, we have come to rely on data to make the types of choices with which agencies of the federal government have been empowered. But data is a funny thing, it can and does come from a multiplicity of sources and to say that input always and conclusively represents this or that is to delude ourselves into thinking that the grand entirety of our world can be reduced to formal models based upon mathematics.

The reality of this is that the nature of these things is entirely subjective, but we remain awestruck by the notion of quantifiability, we over-value that which is called science which is why many of us are now hanging on the every word of two very bright but entirely fallible doctors.

In science, the process often proceeds from observation to hypothesis to predictive results and then confirmation or negation, again by observation. If confirmed we have a theory – a pretty good idea of how things work – but what if the process goes awry, the data set is wrong, and the supposed confirmatory evidence is therefore tainted or incomplete?

Then we would be forcing the proverbial square peg into the round hole, we will demand that reality comport with a faulty model.

This is exactly what Fauci and Birx are now doing. Their predictions in no way represent medical reality here in the United States. Taking the above approach they hypothesized, from limited and tainted data and thought it confirmed their theory.

But the problem is that at every turn it is now clear that neither of these authority figures have a real grasp of the dynamics of the engineered ChiCom virus, yet they refuse to admit they were wrong.

Can anyone forget these two telling the American people that this flu was so deadly that 1-2 million of us would die? But that didn’t take place, so estimates were reduced tenfold, still 1-200,000 deaths would be a nightmare, but it too didn’t happen.

This writer right now has no idea as to what kind of pseudo-science is driving the numbers, though it seems that the ChiCom virus will kill about the same number of people who normally die of the “common” flu.

We are now faced with an opportunity to re-evaluate this entire approach. You cannot close the arsenal of the free world on the strength of predictions made by now entirely discredited individuals – this includes the ChiCom tool who now runs the UN’s World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, a Third Worlder who is not a medical doctor [Ed: Third Worlder not being a pejorative, but the fact is that a people who are still dealing with malaria cannot be reasonably expected to manage something as complex as world, health, few are ].

During George W. Bush last term he ordered a review process whereby the United States would be better prepared to deal with pandemics, which are always just around the corner. But where was Fauci, where was Birx, where is the standing emergency response infrastructure, the stored surgical masks, ventilators and quick reaction/triage teams which would have been primed to deal with flu viruses had the directive been followed as envisioned? [ED – GW Bush wanted all of this done because his public health team was concerned about the possibility of an enemy using smallpox as a bio-weapon. His team actually war-gamed this possibility, see William Mayer, Obama, GW Bush, WMDs and CDC’s Response to Ebola – U.S. Wide Open For Asymmetrical Warfare On A Horrific Scale and determined that the US was wide-open to attack and that a significant small pox attack would destroy the fabric of America in 30 days!! The 2001 “Dark Winter – Bioterrorism Simulation Exercise,” was created by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington, DC and the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Studies.]

Given the demonstrated need to establish systems to deal with the existential threat of biologically bases asymmetrical warfare, the lack of preparedness in dealing with a comparatively simple virus breakout like Wuhan is confirmatory evidence proving that the United States public health system is just another irresponsibly run bureaucracy, albeit one that can run rogue and trash the global economy.

Marxism drives the entire process of which the response mechanism to ChiCom flu is part. But that ideology no longer is what it purported to be mid-19 th century, history does not motivate events, the proletarian revolution has and never will materialize, capitalism will not bring forth the collectivist state and the labor theory of value is childish.

Instead the brightest of these people have moved wholesale to the theories that have come out of Germany’s Frankfurt School/Institute for Social Research, which primarily consists of a concept called critical theory that holds that it is the empirical approach that should dominate the philosophical content of our politics. More dangerously, Critical Theory is inherently and mandatorily destructive because it is radically revolutionary. The application of the technique [Ideologiekritik in the original German] to the West is toxic, its first thesis being:

“Radical criticism of society and criticism of its dominant ideology are inseparable; the ultimate goal of all social research should be the elaboration of a critical theory of society of which Ideologiekritik would be an integral part.” – Raymond Geuss, The Idea of a Critical Theory – Habermas & the Frankfurt School, pg. 26, Cambridge University Press]

This neo-Marxism is informed by not only Critical Theory, but Intersectionality. The two combine to offer a reductionist approach to deconstructing Western political theory and the civilization which has embraced it.

We should never again allow government doctors [Fauci and Birx] the power to rule this country by edict and fiat. Both Fauci and Birx made their wild prediction of millions of deaths relying upon irrelevant and incomplete data such as the mortality figures coming from the practitioners of socialized medicine in China, Italy and Spain. When they were proven wrong they simply revised their estimates until those too were found wanting in the extreme.

What is going on here is that the data is being judged outside of the manner in which it is employed. Sure the fright-wig scare mongering is irresponsible, but few are using the opportunity to attack the method whereby it was produced. We do not ever again want to see proven failures guiding policy at this level. One hopes that after these dark days pass that Fauci, Birx and WHO’s Tedros Adhanom, are banished from the world of public health, but government is never accountable so they will most likely fail upwards.

It’s the nature of such things after all. (For more from the author of “Comrade Fauci and Field Marshall Birx – the New High Priests of Scientism” please click HERE)

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©2020 PipeLineNews.org LLC, William Mayer. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

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The Trail Leading Back to the Wuhan Labs; China’s Deadly Coronavirus-Lie Co-Conspirator — the World Health Organization

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By National Review. It is understandable that many would be wary of the notion that the origin of the coronavirus could be discovered by some documentary filmmaker who used to live in China. Matthew Tye, who creates YouTube videos, contends he has identified the source of the coronavirus — and a great deal of the information that he presents, obtained from public records posted on the Internet, checks out.

The Wuhan Institute of Virology in China indeed posted a job opening on November 18, 2019, “asking for scientists to come research the relationship between the coronavirus and bats.”

The Google translation of the job posting is: “Taking bats as the research object, I will answer the molecular mechanism that can coexist with Ebola and SARS- associated coronavirus for a long time without disease, and its relationship with flight and longevity. Virology, immunology, cell biology, and multiple omics are used to compare the differences between humans and other mammals.” (“Omics” is a term for a subfield within biology, such as genomics or glycomics.)

On December 24, 2019, the Wuhan Institute of Virology posted a second job posting. The translation of that posting includes the declaration, “long-term research on the pathogenic biology of bats carrying important viruses has confirmed the origin of bats of major new human and livestock infectious diseases such as SARS and SADS, and a large number of new bat and rodent new viruses have been discovered and identified.”

Tye contends that that posting meant, “we’ve discovered a new and terrible virus, and would like to recruit people to come deal with it.” He also contends that “news didn’t come out about coronavirus until ages after that.” Doctors in Wuhan knew that they were dealing with a cluster of pneumonia cases as December progressed, but it is accurate to say that a very limited number of people knew about this particular strain of coronavirus and its severity at the time of that job posting. By December 31, about three weeks after doctors first noticed the cases, the Chinese government notified the World Health Organization and the first media reports about a “mystery pneumonia” appeared outside China. (Read more from “The Trail Leading Back to the Wuhan Labs” HERE)

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China’s Deadly Coronavirus-Lie Co-Conspirator — the World Health Organization

By New York Post. The fog of war obscures much about the novel coronavirus pandemic. But two facts seem absolutely certain. First, China’s Communist authorities have lied, concealed and misled about the origins of the epidemic and the toll of the virus in China. Second, the World Health Organization has acted as Beijing’s handmaid. . .

We shouldn’t be surprised that the Beijing regime lies about the epidemic: It lies about, well, ­everything. From economic data to air pollution figures, the Communist Party doctors information to protect and promote itself. . .

Which brings us to the WHO’s malfeasance in this affair. The WHO should have known at the outset that it was dealing with a bad-faith actor in Beijing. Yet ­instead of immediately insisting upon access, openness and transparency from China, WHO leadership followed the Chinese lead and at times even took the Chinese line.

The very fact that truth-seekers are left counting urns is an indictment not only of the Beijing ­regime, but also of the WHO. To help stem the pandemic, the WHO should have been tirelessly pressing China to tell the truth.

Far from sounding an alarm, however, the UN outfit was ­impassive while Beijing stonewalled international health ­authorities for weeks. Indeed, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus praised the Chinese regime for its “transparency” in the crisis. Tedros, ­recall, was Beijing’s candidate for WHO chief and owes his job to China’s campaign for him at the United Nations. (Read more from “China’s Deadly Coronavirus-Lie Co-Conspirator — the World Health Organization” HERE)

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Socialist Realism – Engineering How Things Should Be

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Taking advantage of crises, created or real is the mother’s milk of transformational politics – so much is this the case that it can be used as a metric to sort between classical liberals and those of a totalitarian mindset.

According to the California Globe, during a Sacramento press gaggle a few days ago, when California’s pretty-boy governor Newsom was asked by a Bloomberg reporter about the “opportunity” that the Wuhan hysteria might provide, he replied, “There is opportunity for reimagining a [more] progressive era as it [relates] to capitalism,’ Gov. Newsom said. ‘So yes, absolutely we see this as an opportunity to reshape the way we do business and how we govern.’”

The honesty with which Newsom replied is indicative of how thoroughly ingrained hard-left politics has become among California’s political class, itself a monoculture.

Under more normal circumstances it might difficult to imagine how much more thoroughly the once great state can become a slave to seditious ideologies, but Wuhan is providing a window into that very dark soul and examples are anything but hard to find.

Item:

“First LA Mayor Eric Garcetti released 1,700 inmates . Then the LA Sheriff tried to shut down all gun stores . Next, Garcetti appointed neighborhood monitors and threatened to shut down electricity and water services to non-compliant citizens. In his most recent action, the mayor admits to using Big Tech to monitor the location of residents and track their coronavirus compliance.” [props, Conservative Treehouse]

Is it madness? Most certainly, but deprived of context, moral necessity for many is devoid of meaning. In this state, the total dominance by practitioners of Marxism-lite have so successfully silenced any form of opposition that there appear to be no contrary opinions at all.

Conservative talk radio is Kryptonite as far as the lefts is concerned. But those of us who listen don’t count really because it is still largely an underground or at least private movement [there being no Rush, Hannity or Levin political parties and hence no center around which to coalesce]. Instead we clandestinely self-identify like the early Christians under Roman Emperor Diocletian’s horrific persecution, huddling together and tracing crude outlines of fish in the dust beneath one another’s feet.

And so in California we have an entire population under house arrest, with fewer rights than genuine felons under similar circumstances. It doesn’t take much imagination to envision the ACLU successfully petitioning the Ninth Circuit to disallow phone tracking of illegal aliens out on federal immigration bail.

During this created crisis, the people are caught in a rip-tide; the Fed says do “x” while some states say do “y” or “x+y” but no one has a clue as to what metrics these differing, but mandated behavioral modes are based upon. The experts don’t know either, but since they are public health types a zero-tolerance mentality now prevails. This writer has been told by local health department officials that “one death is too much,” which of course is anti-science.

People die every day, 36,000 in 2018 died in automobile accidents, nearly 45,000 desperate souls committed suicide in 2016 and 49,000 died of pneumonia, placing it in the top 10 leading causes of death. “Officials” trot out the zero-tolerance trope at every turn, and they set in motion this death-spiral with a straight-face. In some ways this reminds one of Stalin’s capo Beria, who famously said, “show me the man, I will find you the crime,” any justification will be used to facilitate the dark hand of the Deep State which is currently flexing its muscles in an unprecedented way.

Consequently confusion reigns as the behavioral dictates at every level of government are in conflict so it might be time to revisit how things were envisioned by our Founders of this republic.

There is a principle at work here, America’s political class is getting very close to forcing outcomes to bring the world closer to their ideal. Post the Soviet Unions civil-war Lenin preached a doctrine called “socialist realism.” The short definition of this is the central authority using extended [read dictatorial] powers to engineer an idealized social order. The degree to which Lenin and his successor, FDR’s pal, Joseph Stalin followed this plan is remarkable. For example, posters and huge murals depicting and stoking revolutionary ardor and military strength appeared overnight. Likewise a writers conference was organized so that the printed word [newspapers, novels, theatrical scripts, etc.] fell into line with the heraldic artwork. What took place was Stalin using every power available to the state to create the reality consistent with his ultimate purpose, which of course was military conquest and subjugation.

When all that one reads, sees or hears reflects the same message, a society’s culture cannot help but change and the longer and more intense the disinformation campaign is in effect, the more rapid and thorough the “fundamental change.”

This is a clear conflict between the objective reality of what actually is, as contrasted against that which can [or should] be.

At roughly the same time there were actors in the free world undertaking their own transformation. A particularly aggressive art movement, Surrealism, was trying to change the consciousness of Europe. In a move that was unprecedented the Surrealists actually printed manifestos condemning traditional art forms and advancing their new technique. Considering that these artists tended to be Bohemian in nature and accepting of socialism it could only be expected that even this seemingly minor move pushed society a bit off course.

We are at such a point in history where the traditional political roles of the various states and those of the central government are in such conflict that it would be very surprising if after the current crisis ends, that the federal government does not emerge with even more power. Instead of super-nationalist propaganda, the agent of change today is the political response to the Wuhan flu. As we have seen throughout the history of the United States, the federal government assumes a more powerful role during and following major conflicts. It was just as true after the Civil War as it was after World War II; the proof of this principle is rather easy, simply look at the size of the federal budget before and after these conflicts. In the case of World War II the federal budget grew by a factor of 10, which works out to 1,000%!

These things matter; the United States is a Constitutional democracy with specific roles set forth in our founding document delineating how power would be shared between Washington DC and far flung localities – Americans have been raised with the desire to be left alone and enjoy the fruits of their labor without someone constantly looking over their shoulders.

Since 1787, the Constitution has been the supreme law of the land and it has among its unique features, a doctrine called Federalism which means that – theoretically – the state and national governments have very different mandates. The Federal Government is bound under Article 1, Section 8, clause 1-18 by a concept called enumerated, declared or implied powers, “The Congress shall have Power To…” lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts, provide for the common defense, to raise and support armies and navies, coin money, establish post offices, establish a system of patents and copyrights, facilitate interstate commerce and the like.

Under this theory, those powers not enumerated as being within the purview of the central government devolve or revert under the 10th Amendment [part of the Bill of Rights] to be exercise by the individual states under the concept of “states’ rights.”

But over the more than two centuries since the drafting of the Constitution many of the powers originally thought to be the sole purview of the states have been taken over by the federal government. The best and most recent example of this is in President Obama’s signature piece of legislation, the Affordable Care Act, within which are a blinding number of usurpations of what had been states’ rights, for example the act delegates near dictatorial powers to the Secretary of Health and Human Services. Actually the Act obliterates the last vestiges of the 10th Amendment.

As Phillip Klein noted in the American Spectator, as later cited in Forbes:

“There are more than 2,500 references to the secretary of HHS in the health care law (in most cases she’s simply mentioned as “the Secretary”). A further breakdown finds that there are more than 700 instances in which the Secretary is instructed that she “shall” do something, and more than 200 cases in which she “may” take some form of regulatory action if she chooses. On 139 occasions, the law mentions decisions that the “Secretary determines.” At times, the frequency of these mentions reaches comic heights. For instance, one section of the law reads: “Each person to whom the Secretary provided information under subsection (d) shall report to the Secretary in such manner as the Secretary determines appropriate.”

This highlights a contradiction.

Yes, the Feds have greatly curtailed the power of the states, not to mention the rights of citizens, but generally this has only happened on issues important to the left. In plain language it has been the Marxists and their Deep/Administrative State allies who have used its overwhelming force to steamroll and remake the states into their own “image and likeness.”

The assault has taken many forms. The Feds can link aid to states with a certain kind of behavior, for example it may withhold tuition aid to colleges if they don’t spend the same amount of money on men’s and women’s sports programs. For our purposes though an especially effective one is using the US Justice Department as a hammer to sue entities or individuals for being in violation of regulations created from whole cloth by faceless, uncaring often malign bureaucrats in cabinet level departments who can force compliance.

The EPA can sneeze and some unfortunate company might be fined tens-of-thousands of dollars a day for encroaching upon the environment of a tiny fish or land that had arbitrarily been declared protected wetland.

Such regulations have the force of law, all that need be done is for the new rule to be published in the Federal Register and after a short period of comment, usually for a maximum of 90 days, if there is no hue-and-cry, it becomes law, as if it had originated and been passed by congress and then signed by the president.

This is the dirty little secret about the administrative state Congress over a very long time, generations, has ceded more and more authority to the bureaucracy which sets the stage for rule-making replacing legislation [please refer to Marini and Masugi’s, The Unmasking of the Administrative State] With increasing frequency all Congress does is direct an entity to do something and leaves the details to the bureaucrats who are almost uniformly Democrats.

When the power of the Civil Right Division of the DOJ is set loose, you tend to take notice since we are talking literally hundreds of attorneys who are already drawing salary and as a result are eager to engage.

Oh, and DOJ’s US attorneys are not noted for playing fair, they want their pound of flesh and will invent or fabricate evidence, “loose” important documents that should be handed over during discovery, forge the handwritten notes of interviews [302s] if need be. Consider the actions of such DOJ gems as Kathryn Ruemmler, Matthew Friedrich and Andrew Weissman [yes THAT Andrew Weissman] – Sydney Powell, License to Lie.

So absolutely, we have a dual system of justice, the swells always land on their feet, the rest of us however end up trampled.

In the following example we will explore in detail how the DOJ bludgeons municipalities in an attempt to reengineer the ethnic distribution in cities and towns that are ALREADY in compliance with relevant Federal codes.

It’s called the principle of disparate impact, social meddling on a vast scale. The bottom line here is that the Fed believes it has the right to tell citizens exactly where they will be permitted to live dictates, it’s the Mother of all Quota schemes.

Pay attention.

During the last term of the Obama Administration a particularly noxious decision by Supreme Court [5-4] provided evidence of how the abusive the Federal Government can actually be.

When government alleges “discrimination” and other supposed offenses where they don’t exist, it limits the right of citizens to defend the culture they in part create when doing something as simple as choosing where to live.

The problem as the Department of Housing and Urban Development [HUD] and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission [EEOC] and the rest of the federal government sees it, is that the real-world demographic distribution of various “protected classes” throughout the United States is unacceptable because the composition of every community isn’t identical to that of the bureaucrat’s idealized diversity model.

The 2015 decision, Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs et al. v. Inclusive Communities Project, Inc., et al, deals with the idea of how to address [as if it were necessary] a “problem” called “disparate impact” which really means being held responsible for breaking a law that one has not broken.

Remedy what-is-not-broken!

The case stems from a regulation adopted by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development calling it, “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing” [the link takes you to a slightly rule innocuously appeared again in the Federal Register on January 14 of this year. But, surprise, surprise, HUD only allowed 60 days for comment, meaning it expired on March 14, 2020 and to this writer’s knowledge no other news source has published anything about this matter, which is troubling from the perspective of preserving the current “cultural hegemony,” the term doctrinaire Marxists would employ.

At trial HUD alleged, and the court agreed, by a single vote, that it has the authority to socially re-engineer every American housing community by forcibly adjusting its ethnic composition, regardless of the fact that such “unequal” numerical distributions are:

“not designed, intended, or used to discriminate because of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.” [see decision, dissent by Justice Thomas, p. 34]

If you think this might be a 21st century resurrection of the 1970s and 80s incredibly divisive issue of forced school busing to achieve [and utterly fail] at enforcing an ephemeral policy establishing “racial neutrality” you would be correct. If not actively challenged, as was the forced busing scheme, the “Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs” case will allow the federal government to essentially mandate where one might live and who one’s neighbors might be – pity the communities in which the Fed deems in effect there aren’t enough violent drug dealers or Islamic fanatics in your neighborhood.

This decision allows the HUD/EEOC/FHA etc. to specifically target predominantly white suburban communities which naturally formed outside of the confines and as a response against high-crime violent inner cities inhabited primarily by people of color.

As Justice Alito stated in his dissent, especially regarding the statutory language of the Fair Housing Act:

“The FHA is not ambiguous. The FHA prohibits only disparate treatment, not disparate impact. It is a bedrock rule that an agency can never ‘rewrite clear statutory terms to suit its own sense of how the statute should operate.’ This rule makes even more sense where the agency’s view would open up a deeply disruptive avenue of liability that Congress never contemplated. Not only does disparate- impact liability run headlong into the text of the FHA, it also is irreconcilable with our precedents.” [see decision, dissent by Justice Alito, joined by the Chief Justice, Justice Scalia and Justice Thomas, p. 60-61

Additionally, Justice Thomas assailed what he views as an overbroad application of a previous case, Griggs v. Duke Power Co.:

“Griggs’ disparate-impact doctrine defies not only the statutory text, but reality itself. In their quest to eradicate what they view as institutionalized discrimination, disparate-impact proponents doggedly assume that a given racial disparity at an institution is a product of that institution rather than a reflection of disparities that exist outside of it.” [see dissent, Justice Thomas, p. 36]

Despite a total lack of evidence that there was any intent to discriminate against protected classes [because it didn’t exist] the very fact that there is a statistical skew in HUD’s metric is in itself actionable. Shockingly, according to the ruling the plaintiff only has the responsibility of establishing a prima facie case of “disparate impact” upon which the defendant is then essentially found guilty unless it can be proven that some overriding, exculpatory mitigating purpose can be established.

The larger question contrasts equality of opportunity – one of the bed rock principals of the nation – against equality of outcome, which is only possible in a totalitarian system. This is true because people have a limit to how much of their property they will allow the central government to expropriate without rising in direct, possibly violent, opposition.

We are into this pretty deep, the Fed continues to encroach on the prerogatives of the state where its operation conflicts with ideology of the collectivists, BUT at the same time allows states a ridiculous amount of leeway even when the issue at hand is a right enumerated in the Bill of Rights.

From this vantage point there are a number of developments we have allowed to take root under what was the Tree of Liberty. The first of these is obvious, the Federal Government has become such a behemoth that it cannot but help step on our basic rights. Since the only way one can get at this is to make the Fed weaker, this means materially reducing the size of “our” central government, eliminating entire departments as not within the charter of a republican democracy. The second, seeming contradictory is to use what would still be the crushing power of the Department of Justice to force states to comply with the written word of the Constitution.

Here one envisions DOJ suing the State of California over its requirement of background checks for the purchase of ammunition.

Both of these hinge on a single factor, right-minded people putting similarly oriented into positions of authority; this can only be done in our system through the electoral process.

(For more from the author of “Socialist Realism – Engineering How Things Should Be” please click HERE)

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©2020 PipeLineNews.org LLC, William Mayer. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

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It’s Time to Make the State Governments Feel the Pain and Consequences of the Disproportionate Shutdown of America

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At present, governors and mayors face no political downside to suspending democracy and the economy with overly draconian measures. They only face accolades and praise from the media commensurate to the degree of lockdown they promote, based on the faulty science that failed so miserably in Europe. It’s time to make them feel the pain of their decisions so that they are forced to pursue a more prudent and balanced approach to coronavirus.

So far, all the damage to our liberty and economy is being pushed by state and local governments, not the feds. On the other hand, all the bailouts and responsibility for dealing with the fallout of their virtue-signaling decisions are being placed on the president. Isn’t it time for state legislatures and county councils to convene and take full responsibility? If they are big enough to declare nuclear winter on liberty, jobs, and the economy, they are big enough to handle the blowback and pay for their decisions.

To that end, citizens should pressure their state officials to suspend numerous forms of state taxation during the duration of the shutdown. The longer the shutdown continues, the longer states should do without their revenue. Furthermore, President Trump should promise that the $150 billion that state governments received during the last epic spending bill will not be present in the next one that will inevitably pass in a few weeks.

Yesterday, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy posted on Facebook that Congress should suspend the recently implemented cap on state and local tax deductions (SALT) on the federal income tax form for this year. I certainly understand why he feels that way, but this proposal is extremely insidious. He wants to have it both ways – shut down the state completely and then have the federal government bail him out from his already astronomical property taxes that long predated this crisis.

How about we do the opposite? Rather than the federal government incentivize greater state taxation by subsidizing it at the federal level, states should be pressured to cut property taxes until the shutdown is over. If the situation really requires economic nuclear winter, as the governors are suggesting, then they have no moral right to demand that people pay property taxes. This form of taxation eats away at people’s homes, even if they have long paid off their mortgages and even if they have no income.

Consider governors like Virginia’s Ralph Northam, who plans to shutter the economy until at least June 10. How does he expect people to pay their property taxes? And if a single man can rule by fiat without a rigorous and transparent debate in the legislature, then why should the citizens pay taxes at all? Aren’t we back to where we started in 1776, with taxation by King George without representation?

As of now, governors can virtue-signal on the cheap without owning up to the consequences of their actions and being forced to balance tough decisions and outcomes. Unlike federal taxes, most state taxes come from sales and property and are still being paid. Plus, governors have the federal government paying for the entire economic mess and bailing out the states with printed funny money. Thus, from their end, they can keep this charade going forever, even if prudence dictates within the next few weeks that we should pursue a different strategy for coronavirus.

With most property tax bills coming due at the end of June, it’s time for legislatures to reconvene and suspend payment for six months. They should also waive other state fees and taxes and ban salaries of top state executive officials until the shutdown is at least partially lifted.

Most of all, it’s time to return to self-government. It’s simply indefensible for Congress and state legislatures to remain out of session without public hearings and debate (at least remotely) over every aspect of the lockdown strategy and its cascading effects on our lives. If at this juncture in history – with the outcome of every aspect of our lives hanging in the balance more than at any time since World War II – elected representatives are hiding in their bunkers, then why do we even have them?

If we are going to be confined for months on end with so many citizens out of a job, we need more transparent answers to the questions about this strategy of the lockdown and all of the nakedly political decisions being made under the guise of saving lives. The stakes are too high to take our government on faith and credit. (For more from the author of “It’s Time to Make the State Governments Feel the Pain and Consequences of the Disproportionate Shutdown of America” please click HERE)

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Subways, Buses and Trains Still Running in Coronavirus Hot Spots. How Exactly Does That Help Fight the Virus?

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It’s hard to think of a more opportune place for a contagious virus to spread than in subways and on buses. Yet, weeks into the shutdown of businesses that never engender large crowds and prohibition in some states for citizens to hike in wide-open state parks, mass transit is still running to some degree in almost every major hot spot. Let me guess: This is also scientifically sound policy built on the vaunted “models and projections,” right?

So many parts of America are now thankful they don’t live in Europe, where so many people don’t have cars and rely instead on public transportation for everything. Cars are the great beacon of freedom, movement, and individualism and the symbol of America’s wide-open expanse. Cars are extremely reliable and facilitate every level of personal liberty and economic movement, yet at the same time they are the perfect long-term and short-term vehicle for social distancing and the antidote against viral spreading. Mass transit, on the other hand, is to coronavirus what water and sunlight are to plants.

Here is a sample of some major city or state transit systems still operating either at full or at reduced capacity as of April 1:

New York City

Chicago

New Jersey

Atlanta

D.C. (reduced service)

New Orleans (weekend schedule)

Detroit (limited schedule)

San Francisco (buses, not trains)

Los Angeles

Miami

Seattle

Indianapolis

In some of these cities, you could be pulled over and questioned for simply traveling alone in your car, but the subways are still open! New York is the big shocker. Police have to patrol the cars to count how many people are in them.

Wouldn’t you expect mass transit to be the first thing shut down during this epidemic? National Review’s Dan McLaughlin observes how by tracing the zip code map of coronavirus cases in New York City, it is quite evident that the subway lines could have played an outsized role in transmission of the virus.

Yes, shutting it down would be disruptive, but not nearly as disruptive as a full nuclear winter on all businesses and even very important medical care, which is now causing the furloughing of vital health care providers.

I live right outside Baltimore, not exactly rural Wyoming. Everyone in my neighborhood has two cars, and it is by no means an upper-income neighborhood. Keeping most businesses open, facilitated through individual car travel and wearing masks and gloves, would result in exponentially better outcomes for our lives, economy, and yes, defeating the virus than shutting everything down but leaving open mass transit.

Whatever value added one can possibly see in keeping mass transit open in large cities, even under a weekend schedule, it would not get nearly as many people to work as lifting some of the more draconian bans on businesses. And with so many people working at home anyway, lots of friends and neighbors who don’t have cars would be able to borrow them. It wouldn’t work for everyone, but it would sure get more people to work than a mandatory lockdown.

According to payroll provider ADP, the entirety of the net job losses in March came from small businesses, which are the easiest venues to implement safe sanitation and distancing. With mass transit still running and criminals being released, this is exactly the time we should apply the Illinois Supreme Court’s exception to state quarantine powers – when “regulations adopted for the protection of the public health are arbitrary, oppressive and unreasonable.” (People ex. rel. Barmore v. Robertson, 1922.)

Alas, the reality is that mass transit is a holy grail of the Left, just like jailbreak, which is why these authoritarian policies, not grounded in reality, are so arbitrary and political. Shockingly, rather than moving away from mass transit, $25 billion in transit funding was slipped into the coronavirus rescue bill that was signed into law last week. Nancy Pelosi is already calling for a “phase 4” coronavirus bill to fund mass transit, among other pet projects.

Again, at what point and after how much devastation are we the citizens going to start asking questions of the government and the media and why their supposed concern for science and regard for “science” always results in inconsistent outcomes benefiting their long-standing political beliefs? (For more from the author of “Subways, Buses and Trains Still Running in Coronavirus Hot Spots. How Exactly Does That Help Fight the Virus?” please click HERE)

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Biden, Seeking an Answer to Irrelevance, Walks Into Trump’s Trap

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. . .Since releasing his plan, Biden has continued to attack Trump about the coronavirus, with limited success. In addition to the problems listed above, Biden’s appearances highlight that there’s something wrong with him. His blunders are not the usual gaffes of someone always under the spotlight. They’re the mistakes of someone who is a few cards short of a full deck. . .

Because the Trump team is intelligent, it’s so far opted to avoid attacking Biden’s obvious weaknesses. Instead, Kellyanne Conway chose to demand that Biden put his money where his mouth is if he has such great ideas. . .

Biden was unable to resist the bait, announcing that he would reach out to Trump. And Trump, seeing his fish on the hook, had the right answer:

When asked whether he would be receptive to a phone call with the Democrats’ primary frontrunner, the president said yes.

There’s no way Biden can come out of this conversation looking good. Trump will treat him with the utmost respect while making sure to highlight the fact that Biden was useless during the Obama presidency, that Biden’s plans are duplicative of what Trump has already done, and that Biden is mentally weak. The best thing of all would be to televise this meeting because it would highlight Trump’s vigor and acumen compared to Biden’s faded glory. (Read more from “Biden, Seeking an Answer to Irrelevance, Walks Into Trump’s Trap” HERE)

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While Americans Are Locked up Without Judicial Review, Courts Grant New Rights to Criminal Aliens!

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Where are the ever-meddlesome courts when you need them?

As Americans are placed under house arrest, local governments are spying on citizens, and every clause of the Bill of Rights is violated, we are told that governments are simply exercising their enormous police power to preserve public health. As such, there is barely a peep about lawsuits against these draconian and often overbroad measures. Yet at the same time, criminals and illegal aliens continue to get standing in court to sue for their freedom of movement. Orwell could not have written a better plot.

We are moving closer to martial law in this country, as the president has taken over industries under the Defense Production Act, states are issuing travel restrictions on other states, and snitch lines are being posted to spy on fellow citizens. The ever-powerful courts, as the supposed guardians of civil liberties, are nowhere to be seen, except for allowing illegal aliens to violate our sovereignty and for criminals duly convicted of crimes to be set free.

Consider the following:

Last Monday, the Supreme Court allowed two criminal aliens deported decades ago to reopen their cases to potentially overturn their deportations. Despite the clear statutory bar on judicial review, Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh joined with the other liberals on the court to ignore both our nation’s sovereignty and Congress’ power to strip jurisdiction from the courts. Only Justices Thomas and Alito dissented. Thus, while Americans are confined within their homes or banned from traveling from certain states, criminal aliens can get standing to sue to travel back across our international border! This decision will open a Pandora’s box of countless terrible criminal aliens deported since 1996 to reopen their cases.

A federal judge in the Southern District of New York ordered the release of 10 criminal aliens from an ICE detention facility in New Jersey (outside her jurisdiction), contending that they were “medically compromised.” In addition, Judge Dolly Gee, the same woman who was so instrumental in spawning the public health crisis at the border last year, has ordered HHS to “make continuous efforts” to release children from custody who are currently being held at Office of Refugee Resettlement facilities. So, the same unilateral authority given to executives to confine Americans under the guise of public safety is now given to both the executives and courts to release people who don’t belong in this country. Something doesn’t add up.

The Montana Supreme Court ruled that local police cannot hold an illegal alien burglary suspect for 48 hours so ICE can pick him up on immigration charges. We are now told there is quite literally nothing a local government cannot do to restrict the movement of citizens and indiscriminately shut down businesses of Americans, even when they don’t engender large gatherings. Yet, somehow, they can’t assist in enforcement of federal immigration law, as they do so with many other federal laws.

On Friday, the Ninth Circuit ruled in a nationwide class action suit that all those bogus asylum seekers being held pending their credible fear determination must be given bond hearings for potential release. Again, while Americans are locked up, they get to be released. What is so shocking is that statute says (8 U.S. Code § 1225(B)(iii)(IV)) they SHALL be detained during the credible fear determination and cannot be released. Moreover, Congress in 1996 (8 U.S.C. § 1252(f)(1)) explicitly blocked all lower courts from issuing class action injunctions in this context.

Judges throughout the country are ruling that criminals must be released during the epidemic, even where the elected officials have opted not to do so.

We all understand the broad powers of a state to quarantine people to prevent the spread of diseases. But if that is true, then by a factor of a million, the federal government has the national security and sovereignty power to prevent the entry and release of aliens as well as the release of criminals without judicial intervention to protect public order. The courts can’t have it both ways – remain silent on overly broad quarantine laws against peaceful Americans, while restricting the executives of this nation from enforcing laws against illegal aliens and criminals.

Something is not right here. How can we take this national emergency seriously and believe the science behind lockdown policies (when they’ve failed in Europe and when Asia succeeded without them), when this same fascist federal and state juggernaut is somehow reduced to rubble when it comes to acting against illegal aliens and criminals?

Let’s review the outcomes from the COVID-19 crisis:

Most sweeping restrictions, surveillance, and confinement of Americans indefinitely without due process in the history of America? Check!

Endless welfare, debt, and spending? Check!

Mass release of criminals? Check!

More foreign workers as a time of record unemployment? Check!

More rights for illegal aliens to come and remain here? Check!

Why is it that every policy outcome from this crisis is a long-standing liberal priority, even when the several outcomes contradict the rationale underlying some of the others?

Something very dark is afoot here, and it’s time for the citizenry to begin asking questions. That begins with convening state legislatures to return the government to we the people. (For more from the author of “While Americans Are Locked up Without Judicial Review, Courts Grant New Rights to Criminal Aliens!” please click HERE)

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You Can’t Go to Church, but You Can Get an Abortion. Stop the Coronavirus Insanity!

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At this rate, the only “constitutional rights” left that will be guarded by the courts are those of illegal aliens, violent criminals, and baby-killers at abortion facilities.

For the first time in American history, all churches and most businesses have been shut down indefinitely – even those following the CDC guidelines – all without sufficient evidence that it is necessary. Every mayor, county executive, or sheriff has become a medieval duke who can rule under the divine right of a king. Every clause of the Bill of Rights has been suspended in its most basic application without any desire to more narrowly tailor the severe infringements to clearly defined, evidence-based policy goals.

Where is that judicial supremacy juggernaut during this whole ordeal, the same juggernaut that spawned the worst border and health crisis from illegal aliens in 2018-2019?

Well, we’ve finally detected a pulse in the courts. Indeed, there are limitations on the power of a governor to shut down our lives and economy at any cost: A federal district judge in Texas ruled yesterday that Governor Greg Abbott has no power to violate the Bill of Rights and shut down abortion services for the duration of the epidemic!

“Regarding a woman’s right to a pre-fetal-viability abortion, the Supreme Court has spoken clearly,” U.S. District Judge Lee Yeakel of the Western District of Texas on Monday. There can be no outright ban on such a procedure.”

But you can ban opening your business outright? You can ban movements and travel between states outright? You can ban all assembly outright?

You see, there is one “religious” service that is evidently legally protected even during a pandemic. It just happens to be the religious service that involves killing babies and is of course not mentioned in the Constitution. A broken clock might be right twice a day, but the corrupt legal profession and court system are perfectly perverted without exception. They rule on the side of fake rights every time, and they ignore infringements on the most foundational natural rights every time.

Judge Karen Henderson noted this in 2018 in the context of illegal immigration. In a dissent in the Garza case, the federal appeals court judge in D.C. wrote that the majority had created a right for illegal aliens to access abortion when even legal immigrants are excluded from the Second Amendment right to own a gun and the First Amendment right to donate to political campaigns.

Abortion is a super-right invisibly inked into the Constitution by the judicial tyrants. Henderson observed sarcastically how settled case law dictates that most other major citizen rights “must yield to the ‘plenary authority’ of the Congress and the Executive, acting in concert, to regulate immigration; but the freedom to terminate one’s pregnancy is more fundamental than them all?”

A few hours after the ruling in Texas yesterday, U.S. District Judge Michael Barrett issued a similar temporary restraining order in Ohio, accusing the governor of creating “a substantial obstacle in the path of patients seeking pre-viability abortions, thus creating an undue burden on abortion access.”

What about an undue burden on just about every other medical service and nearly every other service known to man during this pandemic?

My father needed emergency surgery last week after a bone fragment chipped off his lumbar spine and lodged itself in the sciatic nerve. He was experiencing excruciating pain that even the oxycontin didn’t ease much, but he had a great deal of trouble trouble finding a doctor to even perform the surgery. Finally, thanks to an extended family connection, he found a surgeon willing to perform the operation, but even then, the medical director of the hospital had to sign off on the procedure as “essential.” When he arrived at the Baltimore hospital, personnel were standing around with almost no patients – coronavirus or otherwise. It was a close call and made me wonder how many others will wind up missing out for weeks on end on what should be considered essential procedures.

No, none of those people will get their day in court. But abortion is a sacred religious service to our court system, and “freedom of religion” is protected at all costs.

Or is it?

Yesterday, Florida Pastor Rodney Howard-Browne of the River Church of Tampa was arrested by local police for violating a county order banning services with more than 10 people. While obviously we all want to be careful with public gatherings at this point, we have to be even more careful before we set the precedent of arresting pastors for holding services.

According to his lawyer at Liberty Counsel, Browne was following the CDC guidelines. The church held services in a large auditorium, abiding by the six-foot distancing rule. “The church spent $100,000 on a hospital-grade purification system set up throughout the church that provide[s] continuous infectious microbial reduction that is rated to kill microbes, including those in the coronavirus family,” wrote Mat Staver of Liberty Counsel.

Staver notes that the Tampa order “has 42 paragraphs of exceptions, and another paragraph that further exempts any business that can comply with a six-foot separation.”

“No other secular business has done what this church has done to protect its people. Yet, Hillsborough County and Sheriff Chronister want to openly discriminate against church gatherings.”

At some point, we must recognize that this has gone too far. We have the most inalienable rights on the one side, not to mention zero violations of federal or state law in this case. How can a city or county ordinance written up by an executive, not a legislative body, categorically ban the most foundational rights indefinitely, arbitrarily, and without providing evidence that this is necessary to this extreme extent?

The Supreme Court made it clear in the landmark Jacobson v. Massachusetts case that while the state has the right to mandate vaccinations, state actions to protect public health must “be so limited in their application as not to lead to injustice, oppression or absurd consequence.

As the entire premise for some of these policies is rigorously debated, the American people need to rise up and throw the red flag.

This is the worst mix of tyranny and anarchy. You would think these fascist jurisdictions have zero tolerance for any law-breaking if they are going to “make examples” of people violating made-up edicts against inalienable rights. Not so! We are destroying every foundation of this country and declaring full martial law in order to stop a virus, but on the other hand, the same government officials are releasing violent criminals and allowing abortion to continue. Mind you, these very same jurisdictions acting as if they mean business on law-and-order with lawless edicts are continuing to violate federal immigration law and harboring other countries’ criminals.

One thing we’ve learned through this process is that the ACLU is a fraud through and through. They are absolutists in the context of defending criminal liberties, but never the civil liberties of peaceful Americans exercising their God-given rights. At some point, the enduring words uttered by Patrick Henry, “Give me liberty or give me death,” should mean something to us. (For more from the author of “You Can’t Go to Church, but You Can Get an Abortion. Stop the Coronavirus Insanity!” please click HERE)

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If Money From the Feds Is Free, Why Not Give Everyone $100,000?

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Most politicians in both parties adamantly disagree with President Trump on the need to achieve proper balance between quarantine and our livelihoods. They want an economic and liberty nuclear winter, and they want it indefinitely – without investigating any of the science and data behind it. At the same time, they want to spend trillions upon trillions of dollars “stimulating” a dead body with nothing to stimulate and don’t appear to see any downside to accruing all this debt and risking market distortions. So if that’s the case, why not just give every American a year’s worth of income?

Like all Kabuki theater in Washington, where Republicans agree with Democrats on 99 percent of an issue but fight truculently over the last 1 percent, both parties shook hands (I mean elbow-bumped!) on a $2 trillion stimulus today plus $4 trillion in Federal Reserve shenanigans.

The bill indiscriminately throws too much money in a black hole without better defining and studying the scope of the problem to come up with a better solution. It solves nothing, bankrupts our nation forever, and still brilliantly manages to leave many people behind at the same time!

“In effect, this is a wartime level of investment into our nation. The men and women of the greatest country on Earth are going to defeat this coronavirus and reclaim our future,” said Majority Leader Mitch McConnell when announcing the deal this morning. “The Senate’s going to make sure that they have the ammunition they need to do it.”

The problem is that this is not an investment at all. There is nothing to invest in or stimulate, with both parties pushing an indefinite lockdown. Yes, there were some good and necessary provisions enounced in the bill, such as unemployment benefits for those forced out of work by government (12% of the bill) and more funding for critical health care supplies (5% of the bill). But the rest of the bill is throwing money in a black hole when everyone knows they will pass numerous other bills that will need to double down on more payouts if they don’t address the root of the problem.

We should have a united agenda to get healthy people back to work with a mix of better-targeted geographic and demographic quarantines, supply Americans with masks and gloves to go outside like the Asian countries did, and get a more accurate projection of this virus than the flawed study that has been relied on. Without that, no amount of money in the world will help.

This bill sends a $1,200 check to every adult and an extra $500 for each additional child. The checks are phased out in a graduated scale for individuals earning over $75,000 and families earning more than $150,000 until they are completely eliminated at $99,000 for individuals and $198,000 for couples. It also funds loans and subsidies for corporations and large industries ($500 billion), such as the airline industry. Boeing got a $17 billion carve-out. There is no provision ensuring that those who get funding don’t take the money to China. The cost of the small business loans is $367 billion, along with $150 billion for state governments and $130 billion for hospitals.

Obviously, we all agree that with people forced by government to shut down, they need to be compensated; however, this bill achieves the worst of all worlds. The cost is crushing, but it fails to come anywhere near reimbursing businesses and many individuals for the losses. It indiscriminately mails out checks as high as $3,000-$4,000 for families under the $150,000 income level threshold who have not lost a penny and are still working. On the other hand, those earning over the threshold but who are still not wealthy, especially in high-cost areas, are left with no compensation, even if they are 100% out of work.

Furthermore, this bill calculates income pursuant to last year’s tax filing. That means if you were a small business that earned $200,000 last year but then were completely shut down this year, you are out of luck. Means-testing the rebates rather than situationally testing them as compensation only for those out of work makes no sense.

It’s true that lawmakers expanded and expedited unemployment benefits to cover those people, adding $600 of additional weekly benefits at a cost of $250 billion. But once they have that provision, which will bring weekly unemployment benefits up to $1,000 for most people and as much as $1,200-$1,400 in some states, why did they need the rebates too? Moreover, as Sens. Sasse and Scott are pointing out, it will further incentivize beleaguered employers to lay off more workers. Let’s wait to get the economy moving again, and the income will come back.

This legislation also doubles down on the first rescue bill’s mandated 12 weeks of paid leave and ensures that the cash is advanced to the businesses to cover the mandate.

“Well, government shut these people down, so they deserved to be paid,” some might suggest.

In that case, $1,200 won’t cut it for a once-successful small businesses. So why bankrupt the nation for a half-baked measure that literally cannot stimulate anything at this point, when they will have to spend another $2 trillion in two weeks?

And if our policymakers clearly see no downside to this because they seem to believe the feds can print an unlimited amount of money with limited consequences, then why not give every individual $50,000 and every family $100,000 to make them feel comfortable and quell the anxiety? I’m dead serious. What is the limit, and why is this so arbitrary? At what point do we become like Venezuela? If lawmakers believe there is no risk of that happening, why not fully compensate people for the long-term shutdown these same politicians are pushing?

Given that once the parties agree on something, they pass the bills with lightning speed anyway, why not just separate out the different components and hold individual votes? We need a rule of one issue at a time per bill.

In reality, this is not a WWII-style investment. Here’s what a WWII-style investment would look like:

Congress would immediately convene to debate and study the critical questions that they are taking for granted about the virus itself : When did it begin, how many have already had it, what is the best evidence to properly balance quarantine with work? And then make decisions that flow from that reality.

Congress should push a massive surge in deregulation that is commensurate with the spending surge so that entrepreneurs can know with certitude that they will operate under a pro-business climate in the long run. This will help us decrease our dependency on China, because businesses would be able to operate here without draconian and costly rules.

If we are going to bankrupt ourselves, why not actually invest the money in the form of slashing taxes across the board for several years so we can rebuild by incentivizing employment, not unemployment?

Abolish all foreign worker visas to make sure no American worker is left behind. We need a national plan to rebuild our economy with American labor on American soil and permanently socially distance ourselves from China.

Spawn a revolution in health care competition and freedom by removing all the barriers to starting new hospitals that are now controlled by the incumbent powers.

No member of Congress or high-ranking executive official should be paid until the economy meets a certain benchmark.

That is what a real investment looks like. What Republicans are achieving now is the worst of all policy outcomes and the worst of all political liabilities. Thus, if they are going to accept the premise of the Left that we need an indefinite shutdown and indefinite spending and focus on no other area of how we got to this point and how to get out of it, then why not just mail everyone a $100,000 check? It’s free anyway! (For more from the author of “If Money From the Feds Is Free, Why Not Give Everyone $100,000?” please click HERE)

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